Lindsey Halligan, the lawyer chosen by President Trump to replace the ousted U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, has left no doubt about her willingness to lead a charge on his behalf.
As one of his personal lawyers, Ms. Halligan, a go-for-the-jugular loyalist who is comfortable on television, denounced the F.B.I. when agents seized classified documents in 2022 from Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida. As a White House special assistant, she has taken the lead in scrutinizing exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution for “improper ideology.”
Lacking from her background altogether, however, is any experience in working as a prosecutor or overseeing the complex national security cases that regularly pass through the Eastern District of Virginia. Court records show that Ms. Halligan, who has largely spent her career handling insurance matters in Florida, has filed appearances in only a handful of federal cases during her decade in the law — all of them as one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers.
Despite her slender résumé, Mr. Trump declared on Saturday that he planned to nominate Ms. Halligan, 36, to assume control of one of the country’s most important prosecutors’ offices at a moment of outsize disarray and tension: just after her predecessor, Erik S. Siebert, was forced out by the White House after failing to bring charges against two of the president’s perceived enemies.
The expectation, as expressed by Mr. Trump in a social media post announcing her appointment, is that Ms. Halligan would “get things moving” in an office that had been investigating Letitia James, the New York State attorney general, and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director.
In his post, Mr. Trump called Ms. Halligan “a tough prosecutor,” and he wasted no time putting her in place: Instead of waiting for a formal nomination and Senate confirmation, Ms. Halligan was hastily sworn in as interim U.S. attorney on Monday.
In an indication of how quickly the White House rushed to put her into place, the email sent late Monday afternoon to staff members in the Eastern District about what information to use for official filings initially misspelled her first name.
Mr. Trump has not been shy since returning to the White House about stocking the Justice Department with lawyers who have stood up for him. Attorney General Pam Bondi herself helped defend him during his first impeachment trial. Her chief deputy, Todd Blanche, represented him in several of the criminal cases he faced while out of office.
But Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche had served as prosecutors before ascending to their posts atop the Justice Department. Court records show that Ms. Halligan has never prosecuted any cases and has taken part in only three civil matters in federal court: a failed defamation lawsuit Mr. Trump filed against CNN; an attempt to defend him against a 14th Amendment ballot challenge that was eventually dismissed; and an effort to have the Justice Department freeze its classified documents investigation into Mr. Trump after it conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago.
That last maneuver was ultimately ended by a scathing ruling from a federal appeals court. The appeals court took particular offense to claims by Ms. Halligan and her partners in the case that Mr. Trump deserved special protection against the search because, at the time, he was a former president.
“To create a special exception here would defy our nation’s foundational principle that our law applies ‘to all, without regard to numbers, wealth or rank,’” the appellate judges wrote.
Ms. Halligan was an equally robust advocate for Mr. Trump in public, and drew on the fact that she was present at Mar-a-Lago when F.B.I. agents descended on the estate in August 2022 and hauled off reams of classified materials.
“They looked at God knows what in there, and did God knows what in there,” Ms. Halligan told Sean Hannity on Fox News shortly after the search. “We have no idea. What the F.B.I. did was an appalling display of abuse of power.”
The White House and the Justice Department did not respond to questions about Ms. Halligan’s lack of prosecutorial experience.
Tim Parlatore, a lawyer who worked with her on the documents case, said he “found her to be very hard-working, intelligent and also with a deep understanding not only of what was going on in the case but what the president’s priorities were.”
Ms. Halligan first met Mr. Trump in November 2021 at an event at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla., she told The Washington Post in an interview in April. Having come from court, she was wearing a suit, unlike other guests, she said, when Mr. Trump took note of her and asked her what she did for a living.
Less than one year later, he brought her on to his legal team.
At that point, she had been working as a lawyer for less than a decade, having graduated with a law degree from the University of Miami. She briefly interned for the Innocence Project, which specializes in fighting wrongful convictions, and for the Miami-Dade County public defender’s office. But she mostly worked for an insurance firm, Cole, Scott & Kissane, in Fort Lauderdale, becoming a partner in 2018.
When Mr. Trump was re-elected, Ms. Halligan followed him from Florida to Washington, taking a job in the White House as a special assistant and senior associate staff secretary. One of her first assignments was to cleanse the Smithsonian Institution of any exhibits or programs that “degrade shared American values,” “divide Americans based on race” or include “improper partisan ideology,” according to an executive order Mr. Trump issued in March.
The order mentioned Ms. Halligan by name, saying she would work closely on the effort with Vice President JD Vance.
“I would say that improper ideology would be weaponizing history,” Ms. Halligan told The Post. “We don’t need to overemphasize the negative to teach people that certain aspects of our nation’s history may have been bad.”